Pajiba: Sweetened by Mock, Lightened by Droll

Check it: The universe isn't really here. It exists only because the thetans (aka alien souls) believe in their minds that it exists. So everything around you isn't real, it's a manifestation. You aren't really reading Pajiba because Pajiba isn't real. Well, it is, but only in thetans' minds. I guess if you're a thetan you're in good shape - but the rest of us - I don't know. Thetans were brought here to this planet Teegeeack (Earth), that only exists in their minds, on a DC-8 with no engines, by their good lord and dictator, Xenu. Now keep this to yourself, please, and consider yourselves lucky because usually you'd have to pay a gazillionty dollars to get that last bit of information. Xenu is a secret until you've contributed lots and lots of pretend money (remember, it's all in the thetans' minds) to Xenu's church. But first you have to be hypnotized (audited) over and over until you are convinced of all this stuff I'm telling you, and that shit gets expensive. Now like any good lord/dictator who was about to lose power over his universe, Xenu had kindly frozen a good majority of his subjects before they could overthrow his ass (he kind of pulled that "Dateline" shit when they catch the pedophiles by tricking them into showing up at a hotel room, only he lured them with income tax inspections) and shipped their little alien souls to Teegeeack/Earth so they could pretend everything here which turned out to be pretty cool for you and me. But some of this is getting confusing because when he transported those alien critters to our little mind planet they must have still had some sort of physical being because he bombed the crap out of them all and only a few physical critters remained. Most of what survived were those alien souls/thetans and then Xenu vacuumed them up and spat them back out all over the pretend universe. I hope you're still with me here because I'm even getting a little confused myself - but we need to try to understand our fellow...souls...so hang in there a minute or so longer. SO THEN, kind of like Clockwork Orange, that Xenu bastard forced all the alien thetan souls to watch a lot of crappy 3-D movies that made them believe in God and the devil and even Catholicism. As you can imagine, those poor alien thetan souls were mighty confused when Xenu set them free and they all huddled around in a daze until the few, really smart and fully evolved Scientologists (insert holy sound effect here) began to teach and hypnotize the thetans who had enough money. Meanwhile, some badass rebels overthrew Xenu and locked him away in The Pyrenees, so don't you worry about him anymore. Whomever is in charge of the rest of the universe (that doesn't really exist anyway) declared Teegeeack/Earth a prison planet and we've been mostly forgotten about (though if we are invaded by aliens now and then you can be sure it's the Scientology aliens).

Ta-da! I've just saved you hundreds of thousands of dollars and you have officially gained all the Scientology knowledge you need. However, the Scientologists have other secrets - some of them can be violent assholes, some of them blackmail celebrities and people in power and some of them might even be batshit crazy. Very few Scientologists escape (the life? the religion? the insanity?). Writer/Director Paul Haggis (Quantum of Solace, Million Dollar Baby, /The Next Three Days, Crash) is one of them; he left Scientology in 2009 after expressing his unhappiness over the group's support of Proposition 8 and its stance on homosexuality. Now he is set to write (along with New Yorker writer, Lawrence Wright) perhaps the biggest exposé of Scientology, with his agent calling it "the most profound reckoning to date." The Heretic of Hollywood: Paul Haggis vs.The Church of Scientology is also set to make public alleged violence and physical abuse by "church" leader David Miscavige and the conditions under which certain volunteer workers are forced to live.

Now don't get me wrong, I'd be thrilled to have this whackadoodie money-making "religion" get the full treatment so at the very least, it stops getting that tax break. At the same time, it's hard to take someone who got involved in this mess seriously - but I suppose even smart people can be hypnotized. I've always found it fascinating that anyone could be duped into what was clearly entirely made up by L. Ron Hubbard and maybe we'll get a true story of how that can happen. Meanwhile someone had better keep an eye on Paul Haggis.